an obsidian alternative

shizumu is an obsidian alternative for the part of your writing that is thinking, not filing. it is what people reach for after the vault got big and the first thing every note asked was where it goes.

how the two behave

obsidian gives you a vault: folders of markdown files, links between them, a graph, and plugins for the rest. it is a system, and a good one, for people who want to build one. the work of the vault is deciding where each note lives and what it links to, and that work happens before the writing.

shizumu gives you a page. every day starts on an empty one. you write to think, you pin what turns out to matter, and when a thread continues past today you put the page on a trail. the pins you kept on that trail come back onto the page the next time you open it. everything else stays in memory, searchable. nothing asks where a page goes, because a page does not go anywhere.

open source, self hosted, on your machine

people searching for an obsidian alternative open source tend to mean two things: can i read the code, and can i keep my data. the client and the sync relay are both on github, apache-2.0 on the client and agpl-3.0-or-later on the relay. the writing is a sqlite file on your device. sync is optional and end-to-end encrypted, and the relay is yours to run: an obsidian alternative self hosted from the first day, with the deploy guide and what the relay can and cannot see written down. that is the obsidian alternative open source self hosted searches ask for, in one sentence.

what the page can do

the page is not plain text. / for a table, a chart, an outline, a block of code. @ to reach a page, a pin, or a trail. ctrl+k for the trail index. a continuous trail is one long document you keep adding to, for a book or a year-long project. it is the obsidian alternative 2026 threads on reddit describe when they say they wanted fewer decisions and the same tools.

what you leave behind

the graph, the backlinks, the plugin list. shizumu has a way back to what mattered, the pins on a trail, and a search over everything else. if the graph is where your thinking happens, stay. if the graph is where your notes went to be forgotten, this is the other way to do it. an obsidian alternative linux, android, and windows users can install today, free.

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